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Project Managers and Vendors: Creating a Successful Partnership - Part V

March 20, 2008 | Author: admin | Filed under: Communications Management, Procurement Management, Project Management Best Practices

Project Managers and Vendors: Creating a Successful Partnership - Part V (#5 in the series Project Managers and Vendors: Creating a Successful Partnership)
By Linda Miller of Traveling Coaches, Inc.

Project management offices (PMOs) and project managers (PMs) are a necessity in today’s law firms, to ensure that IT projects stay on track. Anyone acting as a PM on a project requiring multiple outside vendors knows that if not managed properly, chaos can reign. Working with your own staff on a project can usually be orchestrated with ease, but throw in a vendor or two (or more) and the project can quickly get out of hand. Creating a successful partnership between vendors and your own project team is a necessity to ensure project success.

A Successful Partnership = A Successful Project

The ability and willingness of a PM to run the project and coordinate with the vendor in a partnership relationship is a critical project success factor. The firm’s PM understands the firm’s methodology, tolerances and personalities, and the vendor PM understands the technology and the flow. The outlook of the law firm PM should be to listen and take advantage of the vendor’s expertise to ensure the firm gets the most out of the project experience. In a nutshell, a successful partnership is based on communication.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate!

Some people love meetings; some hate them; some are stressed or just plain ornery; and many have different ways of processing information. Learning how your internal project team members communicate and dealing with them as a PM can be quite a challenge. Add external resources that you may not have worked with before, and that challenge becomes even bigger. Successful project managers are skilled at bringing project management to skeptical, reluctant or time strapped teams and making it work for them. Key to their success is having a good communication plan for working with internal staff and/or external resources.

Start with a Plan

Project managers must be good communicators, detail-oriented and organized. Project plans must flow, and team efforts must be coordinated. Roles and responsibilities need to be laid out and enforced from the beginning of the project. Informal and formal communication are required to keep everyone headed in the right direction and on schedule. Follow-up on task details and resource allocation is a required process and must be organized at the start.

A communication plan should include scheduled meetings between the firm PM and the vendor PM. It should outline the expectations of these meetings. Items to be discussed will typically include:

  • Tasks that have been accomplished since the last meeting
  • Issues that have been identified
  • Status of incomplete tasks
  • Vendor budget status information
  • Action items

The communication plan should also include schedules indicating when the project leaders will meet formally with their project teams. The project leaders will report back to the PM on progress, issues, risks and accomplishments.

This article was first published in ILTA’s July, 2007 white paper titled “Project Management — Broadening Your Scope” and is reprinted here with permission. For more information about ILTA, visit their website at http://www.iltanet.org.

Linda Miller is co-owner and principal of Traveling Coaches, Inc., leading the company’s team of project managers, application specialists and document management engineers. Linda has extensive experience leading projects with law firms and consulting law firms on project management. Since 1995, Linda has served as the company’s technology partner managing all technical and project management operations. Linda is a dynamic presenter and implementer of project management, adult learning theories (training techniques) and IT management level courses. Linda holds many technical certifications in the legal industry enhancing her valuable experience as a consultant. Linda can be reached at lmiller@travelingcoaches.com.

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